Paul Gay

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After last season’s The Dante Project, the Paris Opera continues to explore the music of contemporary composer Thomas Adès with the French premiere of The Exterminating Angel. Inspired by Luis Buñuel’s 1962 surrealist film, which offered a scathing critique of the bourgeoisie, the work begins with a dinner among upper-class friends in a plush mansion after an opera performance. But, gradually, a mysterious force prevents the fifteen guests from leaving the reception. In this confinement for no apparent reason, drawn out over several days, the veneer of propriety cracks, revealing the worst of human nature. Thomas Adès has written a rich and tense score, amplifying the libretto’s strange atmosphere with unusual instruments such as the ondes Martenot. The Paris Opera has entrusted the staging of this huis-clos to Calixto Bieito. The director has long been fascinated by Buñuel’s universe.

Formerly a daydreaming party girl with a number of mental problems, Cassie has put many of her problems behind her, and waitresses at a café in London after having spent several years travelling around America with Sid Jenkins. Cassie forms an odd friendship with her stalker and tries to support her younger brother, Reuben, as their father, Marcus, fails to cope with the death of their mother.